Page 64 of Snake

That had driven him to his feet.

So now he was kissing her. Because he wanted to.

And damn.

Her resistance had lasted the length of one sudden inhale. Then she went all in, throwing her arms around his neck and rising onto her toes. When he pushed his tongue to her lips, she opened for him with a soft, rolling murmur like a purr, and her tongue met his and urged him deeper.

Jesus Christ.

Cox had never been much interested in kissing—at least not since he was a teenager learning all the mechanics. He supposed he subscribed to the notion that kissing was a particular intimacy, because he rarely felt the desire to kiss a woman he was with and always felt that something was slightly off when a woman went looking for a kiss and he complied.

He had not ever been interested in bringing a woman into his life. He enjoyed sex, he enjoyed having sex with attractive women and did so regularly, but he wanted no one, romantic or otherwise, to be close enough to him to really know him. To Cox, kissing felt—intuitively, as if he’d been programmed this way—like that kind of intimacy.

But here he was, wrapped up with a woman he barely knew, kissing the sense out of her and letting her do the same to him. Not a kiss like in the spring, drunken and stunted and full of self-recrimination; this one might also be a mistake, but it was no accident. He was kissing her because he wanted to, she was kissing him back, and he could practically feel the shape of his mind changing. He was being reprogrammed.

What the fuck?

“What are we doing?” Autumn gasped into the tiny space between them as Cox tipped his head the other way.

“Hush,” he commanded. He shoved his hands into her thick mane and sealed their mouths together so she couldn’t introduce more doubt into this stupendous moment. His head was already a riot of wonder; it would spin apart if they tried to talk about this, question it. Later, but not now.

She offered no further protest and made no further attempt at words. Instead, she bit down on his bottom lip and tried to climb him like a tree. That was vastly better than talking. And cute as all fuck.

Chuckling against her lips, Cox lifted her and set her on the counter. They knocked the first-aid kid to the floor with a crash and scatter, but it registered more like a distant memory than something happening right then. The clubhouse could explode around them, and he wouldn’t care.

He pushed between her thighs, and she hooked her legs around him at once, pressing herself against him. Despite his jeans and her corporate-attire slacks, her heat spread through him and set him alight. Filling his hands with her ass, he drew her even closer, rocked against her. A rough sound, nearly feral, rose from her chest, and she rubbed herself against him all the harder.

She’d slipped inside his open kutte, and the mounds of her breasts pushed against his chest. Through the cotton of his t-shirt, he thought he could even feel her nipples, little points hard as diamonds. Freeing one hand from her ass, he pushed between their bodies to take hold of a breast, pinch down on one firm little gem. Her bra was thin, just a slip of satin under her blouse.

She moaned as his hand cupped her breast, and she bucked wildly, arching her back, when his fingers closed on her nipple. He almost lost the kiss through all those gyrations, but he followed with her wherever she went. This woman was a handful of pure flame.

God, he wanted her naked. But they were in the fucking bathroom.

He finally broke away—but he couldn’t bring himself to let her go, so he leaned his forehead on hers and tried to reclaim his sense from somewhere in his spinning mind.

“Fuck,” he muttered, feeling dizzy.

“Yeah,” she whispered back. She seemed as unwilling to split apart as he was. “What’s happening here, Cox?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Right now, don’t care.”

That made her laugh softly. She tipped her head back and kissed the spot between his eyebrows. “Always frowning.” The soft words flitted over his skin, carried on her breath. “What in your life has made you so angry?”

The strange magic that had Cox behaving like a hormonal teenager shattered, and he took a step back, letting his arms fall away from her. He wanted to tell her to mind her fucking business, he opened his mouth to say exactly that, but his eyes met hers, and he couldn’t do it.

Instead, Autumn reached out and took the hand she’d cared for. “Sorry. I see I crossed a line.”

He meant to nod, to indicate that yes, she had indeed, he was not interested in sharing thoughts and feelings with anybody. But he found his head shaking instead. “I just ... don’t talk about my shit.”

A frown tried to settle on her face, her curved brows quivered with it for a moment, but it couldn’t find purchase. “Okay” was all she said. Then: “Can we talk about what just happened instead? Or ... I don’t know ... what is happening?”

He didn’t want to talk about that, either. His brain was swollen with thoughts, in every direction, and if any of them got out, they’d bury him.

But he also, again, didn’t want to rebuff her. He was worried about her feelings—and that was new. Though he tried not to be a shit to anyone who didn’t deserve it, that impulse wasn’t about the other people. He wasn’t trying to be kind, he wasn’t thinking about others’ feelings. He simply didn’t want to add to the shit mountain that was life among the human race. He had no compunctions about defending his own boundaries, and doing it forcefully enough that he wouldn’t have to do it again. Except, apparently, with this one woman.

“I wanted to kiss you,” he said, because that was true and direct.

She tugged on his hand until he erased the step he’d put between them. “Then why’d you stop?”

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